From The Mixed Up Files Of Mr JT LeRoy

Although he IS credited with the screenplay for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, I confess to not being a fan of JT LeRoy. Not that I’ve ever read the work, mind you. [Hold that thought.]
Recently the authenticity of his identity, his personal story, and the authorship of his works has been called into question, and reporters have started asking if LeRoy is a hoax, a construct, a collaborative, an impostor whose gritty, wrenching, tawdry, and celebrated persona was somehow overshadowing the work itself. Which is funny, because that’s what soured me on his writing right out of the gate–the barrage of hip and celebrity endorsements, most of which came from people who, shall we say, may not be best known for their literary tastes.
Anyway, that doesn’t make Guardian reporter Laura Barton’s deliberately roadtrippy search for the “real” JT LeRoy and her account of her night out with LeRoy’s posse any less interesting. If you like that kind of thing, this is definitely the kind of thing you’ll like.

Who’s that boy/girl? [guardian]
Previously: Van Sant on greg.org
[1/9 update: The jig sounds up to me. In the NYT, Warren St. John identifies the half-sister of one of JT Leroy’s supposed mentor/saviors, Savannah Knoop, [at right] as the real-world stand-in. And then he examines travel expense reports for a JTL story for the Times, which all but confirms that the writing was done by one of these saviors, too: Laura Albert. The Guardian’s Laura Barton thinks that Albert is also Emily, JTL’s friend who took her around LA.]

Syriana: The Screenplay

Warner Bros. has released a PDF version of Stephen Gaghan’s script for Syriana, which we just saw last night. A very intense film, the story is perfectly matched with the fragmented, multi-threaded structure. In another filmmaker’s hands, this movie would have repeatedly ground to a halt for some nonsensical expositional set piece speeches.
Now I’m looking forward to seeing how Gaghan did it.

Syriana-Screenplay.pdf [warnerbros.com via bb]

2005 In A Norwegian Wood, 2005, dur. 3’40”

eirikso_year.jpg

All through 2005, Eirikso shot photographs out of his window in Norway at random times and on random days. Then he merged them into a single, 3.5 minute or so movie using Photoshop and Sony Vegas Video.
See the film, download the film [which he also output to 720p HD, for television viewing], and read about how he made the film at eirikso.com.

The Video Of The Seasons In Norway [eirikso.com via boingboing]

I Guess It Depends On What You’re Searching For

Back in the day (Feb. 2002, that is), I requested clearance to use “Google” as a verb and to show search results screenshots in my first short. The head of Google’s marketing sent me an email saying it was a-ok, and wishing me good luck.
Now it turns out Google’s founders Larry and Sergey bankrolled half the sub-$1mm budget for Stanford friend and Dreamworks CG animator Reid Gershbein’s first live-action feature film, Broken Arrows. The fils is described as “the story of a man who loses his pregnant wife in a terrorist attack and then takes a job as a hit man.” [Clearly, I was searching Google for the wrong thing. From now on, please formulate your requests appropriately.]
According to Gershbein’s production blog, they just screened a rough cut for team members last week, and they’re starting audio, effects, and music editing next month.
Google team sets sights on big screen [sfgate via defamer]
Broken Arrows production blog [brokenarrowsthemovie.com]

First You Get The Money, Then You Get The Power

As the year winds to an end, I think I can officially say it: the art world is whack. It’s all about the Benjamins, and I don’t mean Walter.
I was going to post a diatribe, but instead, I’ll just point out what I’ve already said in print: the small comparison I made between the ravenous fixation on Richard Prince’s appropriations and the parodic, poll-driven works of Komar & Melamid; my calling into question the credibility of a system [i.e., price] that persists in systematically discounting the influence, importance, and value of half the culture; a pair of artists’ self-serving embrace of that same system to overinflate the importance of their work; and the apparently unstoppable influence of the market on the conceptual underpinnings of an artist’s work after he’s gone.
Jerry Saltz hits on a lot of it in his great, biting end-of-year essay in the Voice this week. [I’m glad someone else will call BS on that hilariously embarassing Wizard of Oz photospread in Vogue last month. The idea that someone with a straight [sic] face asked the famously closeted Jasper Johns to be the Cowardly Lion? If I didn’t know how deadly serious the Vogue people took it, I’d say it was the awesomest slam ever of the whole artist-as-vapid-celebrity schtick since Francesco Vezzoli.]
Here’s hoping that in 2006, somehow the bubble will pop, the winds will change, and not too many of my friends’ livelihoods will suffer too much as a result; because I’m looking forward to seeing the art that comes out of it.

I Went To St George, Utah, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt

twu_tshirt.jpg
I was out of town for the holidays [anything big happen while I was gone?] Anyway, for one dollar, less than the price of a subway token, I scored this sweet Transit Workers Union commemmorative t-shirt at the D.I. [aka Deseret Industries, the Mormon-run version of Goodwill] in St. George, Utah.
Not sure if anyone’s ever even heard of the TWU, but I thought it’d be a real kick in the pants to wear this around town.

Have Yourself A Maysles Little Christmas

As I type this, the Maysles Brothers classic Grey Gardens is playing at MoMA. Unfortunately, I’m in the wrong time zone to see it, but watching those Crazy Edies suddenly seems like an excellent Christmas Eve tradition.
Meanwhile, I will be back in time for what would have been an awesome triple feature, if only they weren’t overlapping: sandwiched between the Maysles’s incredible documentary, Salesman [a business school in-class screening of which, for better or worse, set me on my filmmaking path] and Albert’s docu about the making of the Getty Center [worth watching just to see Richard Meier get so pissed at Robert Irwin] is Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which was programmed, surprisingly, by Stephen Sondheim.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and to the rest of you, enjoy your Chinese food.
MoMA Film & Media screening schedule 16-31 Dec 2005 [moma.org]

Free MoMA

I have 20 16 14 10 8 4 free passes to MoMA that expire on 12/31/05. If you’d like a couple, please drop me a line, and I’ll mail them out to you today.
[update: I ended up with 4 passes left, but now I’m out of town and won’t be back before they expire. Sorry. The Target Corporation invites you to Free Friday Nights at MoMA, though… Merry Christmas, &c.]

Image, Style, Taste, Clothes, Death, Prop. 13: NY Doll David Johansen Intervew c.1978

wet_mag_nydoll.jpgHave you heard of Wet Magazine? proto-Punk/New Wave LA deal from the late 1970’s? I confess, my parents were just taking me to my first concert–the Osmond Brothers–in the late seventies.
Anyway, in the Nov/Dec 1978 issue, an unnamed-but-hardhitting journalist from Wet sat down to breakfast with New York Doll David Johansen and really worked him over. The whole interview is about style, style vs. taste, image, clothes, looks, and death. And taxes. Seriously. It’s one of the most deeply, satisfyingly, superficial things I’ve ever read.

WET: Are you very attached to your image?
DJ: I din’t know if I’m that conscious of it. When I see a videotape of myself I wonder who it is for the first couple of minutes. I listen to myself and I say, “Who is that guy? Listen to his voice. He sounds like he comes from Brooklyn or something.”
WET: Where do you come from?
DJ: Staten Island
WET: How often to you go through image changes?

Sharpeworld has scans of the entire issue. The DJ pages are here.
Wet: The Dawn of the L.A. New Wave (style) [sharpeworld.com]
Previously: greg.org on NY Doll

Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities

yin_nyc.jpg
Beijing-based artist Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities series are models of cities inside suitcases, made using the old clothes that city’s residents. In her practice, she explores issues of globalization and homogenization, but also memory and transience.
In a way, her work reminds me of the nomadic Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata, who constructs temporary structures, favelas, and whirlwind-like vortices out of scrap wood and junk he collects around the city. While they exist, they put into play issues of development and destruction and (im)permanence.
Anyway, Yin’s sewn suitcase version of New York City from 2003 includes a shimmering, ephemeral version of the World Trade Center made out of what looks like mesh or organza or something. It’s really quite nice.
via Regine, who has some links to Yin’s work at the Sydney Biennial last year. Yin was also in “How Latitudes Become Art” in 2003 at the Walker Art Center. Her NYC gallery is Ethan Cohen Fine Arts.

Not That You’d Look To The WTC Site For Holiday Cheer,

And it’s true that things have been worse down there…
but seriously, is there nothing that can be done to stop the slide into disgusting travesty that the George Pataki is permitting the Port Authority to perpetuate?

  • People who cared about art and culture and constructive memorializing sound like they hold no hope for the WTC site now.
  • The memorial’s core feature–waterfalls into the voids of the footprints–will be turned off in the winter. Because no one thought of this before? Please.
  • Silverstein vs. Port Authority; empty office towers vs. a mall. If we’d known four three years ago the end game was to be a replica of the Jersey City side of the PATH train, would there have been an outcry?

    Controversy Still Clouds Prospects at 9/11 Site     [nyt]
    What does $1,000,000,000–“excuse me, make that $1.4 billion”–get you downtown? [miss representation]
    WTC Memorial Official: Waterfalls will close in the winter [dt express, via curbed]